Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsGhostcrawler details potential solutions for gear inflation
by Adam Holisky 
Nov 4th 2011 at 1:00PM
Item inflation is the continually increasing numbers we see on gear, getting larger and larger each expansion. Eventually (perhaps even now, according to some), the numbers become so large that they become difficult at a glance to make quick computational decisions about.
Is the difference between 1,600,000 and 1,400,000 health really concerning or not? Probably not, at least in terms of percentages, but the loss of 200,000 health is something that makes you stop and think for a second -- and in a raid, that second might be the time you wipe.
Ghostcrawler has detailed two potential plans to deal with this inflation in a new blog post.
Mega damage In what sounds like a nod to scientific notation, numbers would be visually collapsed into easier-to-consume units. So instead of 5,000 strength, you'd have 5K strength, or instead of 1,500,000 HP, you'd have 1.5M HP. This is what Blizzard does for bosses now, and it'd expand the system to player numbers and other stats.
Another way to think of it: Instead of launching a Shadow Bolt that does 12,000,000 damage, you'd do 12 Mega Damage instead.
The Great Item Level Squish The second possible solution Ghostcrawler outlined is an item level squish, where all item level increases at the end of expansions are squished down. (Inflation occurs mostly at the end of expansions, where the gear increases greatly with each content patch.) This would have the effect of reducing numbers across the spectrum, so a player before MoP might have 200,000 health, and then when MoP launches, he might have only 20,000 health. Item levels and assorted numbers would be squished, potentially quite dramatically.
Ghostcrawler makes a big point, and we're going to put it in bold: These are just possible solutions and might not even be the ones Blizzard goes with in the end. So don't kiss your tank's massive HP goodbye just yet.
Ghostcrawler's full post, after the break.
Is the difference between 1,600,000 and 1,400,000 health really concerning or not? Probably not, at least in terms of percentages, but the loss of 200,000 health is something that makes you stop and think for a second -- and in a raid, that second might be the time you wipe.
Ghostcrawler has detailed two potential plans to deal with this inflation in a new blog post.
Mega damage In what sounds like a nod to scientific notation, numbers would be visually collapsed into easier-to-consume units. So instead of 5,000 strength, you'd have 5K strength, or instead of 1,500,000 HP, you'd have 1.5M HP. This is what Blizzard does for bosses now, and it'd expand the system to player numbers and other stats.
Another way to think of it: Instead of launching a Shadow Bolt that does 12,000,000 damage, you'd do 12 Mega Damage instead.
The Great Item Level Squish The second possible solution Ghostcrawler outlined is an item level squish, where all item level increases at the end of expansions are squished down. (Inflation occurs mostly at the end of expansions, where the gear increases greatly with each content patch.) This would have the effect of reducing numbers across the spectrum, so a player before MoP might have 200,000 health, and then when MoP launches, he might have only 20,000 health. Item levels and assorted numbers would be squished, potentially quite dramatically.
Ghostcrawler makes a big point, and we're going to put it in bold: These are just possible solutions and might not even be the ones Blizzard goes with in the end. So don't kiss your tank's massive HP goodbye just yet.
Ghostcrawler's full post, after the break.
Ghostcrawler
The lead designers were originally going to talk about this topic at BlizzCon, but it didn't really match the content of the rest of our "Intro to Pandaria" presentation, and seeing as how we finished our 90-minute slot with 93 seconds remaining, there wouldn't have been room for it anyway. But several of us did bring up the issue with players and media we talked to, and it even ended up in at least one FAQ, so we figured we'd go ahead and get the information out there. Note that unlike much of what we presented for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion, this is not an announcement. It's more of a problem we'd like to address, and a couple of ways we potentially might do so. Feedback is certainly appreciated.
Big Number Syndrome
Hey, our stats are growing exponentially. If you look at everything from the Strength on a weapon to the damage being done by a Fireball crit or the amount of health the Morchok boss has, they look downright absurd compared to the numbers for level 60 characters in the original shipping version of World of Warcraft. It's not exactly a surprise that we were going to end up here, and we knew where we were going every step of the way, yet regardless, here we are.
The numbers grew so much primarily because we wanted rewards to be compelling. Upgrading from a chestpiece that has 50 Strength into one that has 51 Strength is undeniably a DPS increase for the appropriate user, but it's not a very exciting reward. Such negligible increases can drive players to do some weird things, such as skipping over tiers of gear or entire levels of content. This is particularly relevant when we're talking about a new expansion. We don't want level-85 players to have a reasonable shot at level-90 dungeons and raids (or PvP opponents) just because that content is balanced for gear that isn't much better than what the level-85 players have.
So we arrived at this point in a logical fashion, and we don't really think we should have handled things any differently. However, it's still a weird place to be, and it's about to get weirder. These aren't real items, in that we don't know for sure what the item levels will be in patch 5.3 and patch 6.3 (if only we planned that far ahead!) but they are reasonable guesses, and you can see just how ridiculous the items look.
So what do we do about it? There are two general categories of solutions. The first is to make the numbers appear more manageable and the second is to actually change the numbers.
Mega Damage
The first solution could include changes like adding commas and the like to large numbers. We could also compress all of those 1000s to Ks and all of those 1,000,000s to Ms, much like we do with boss health today. Internally, we have been calling this the "Mega Damage solution" because instead of your Fireball hitting for 6,000,000 damage, it would hit for 6 MEGA DAMAGE (queue the Arcanite Ripper guitar solo).
If we can make numbers such as floating combat text and boss health and item stats a little easier to read at a glance, then maybe we can endure numbers increasing exponentially for many digits to come. Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can't quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we'd have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters.
Item Level Squish
The second solution actually involves compressing item levels, which is why we call it the "item level squish solution." If we can lower stats on items, then we can lower every other number in the game as well, such as how much damage a Fireball does or how much health a gronn has. If you look at the item level curves, you can see that most of the growth occurs at the maximum character levels for the various expansions. This is because we keep rewarding more and more powerful gear to make the new raid tier and PvP season in an expansion reward significantly better gear than the previous one. However, those huge item level jumps don't accomplish a lot once the character level has increased again. Very few players notice or care how much of an upgrade the Black Temple loot is over the Serpentshrine Cavern loot when their characters are level 80.
With that in mind, we could go back and compress the big item level increases that occur at level 60, 70, 80 and 85. The Mists of Pandaria gear would still grow exponentially from patch to patch, but the baselines would be a lot lower. Health could go from 150,000 back down to something like 20,000. The big risk of this approach is that players will log into the new expansion and feel nerfed... even if all the other numbers are compressed as well.
In other words, your Fireball will still do the same percentage damage to a player or a creature that it does today, but the number would be smaller. Logically, this seems like it would work, and it does. But it feels weird. When we tried this internally, everyone agreed that it just felt off throwing a spell for hundreds of damage when you are used to it doing thousands of damage.
I came up with an analogy -- even though I know logically that people drive on the left side of the street in the UK (we drive on the right side of the street in the US) and wouldn't be surprised to see it, it would still feel really disorienting if I was driving in the UK and had to make a right-hand turn.
So Now What?
As I type this today, we haven't decided on which if either solution we want to try. Maybe we'll come up with yet another solution. Maybe it's the kind of thing we can put off for another expansion so that players don't have to adjust to the new talent system and a drastic item level compression at the same time. Or maybe it's better just to pull the Band-Aid off fast and fix everything at once. Time will tell. I did, however, want to outline the problem lest any of you believe we don't think there is a problem. There is. We're just not sure of the best solution yet. If your answer is that stat budgets don't have to grow so much in order for players to still want the gear, our experience says otherwise, and thus these proposed solutions exist. Your thoughts on the matter are valuable.
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. The last time he used "Fig. 5" in an article, it related fish predation to estuarine hydrocarbon contamination.
Big Number Syndrome
Hey, our stats are growing exponentially. If you look at everything from the Strength on a weapon to the damage being done by a Fireball crit or the amount of health the Morchok boss has, they look downright absurd compared to the numbers for level 60 characters in the original shipping version of World of Warcraft. It's not exactly a surprise that we were going to end up here, and we knew where we were going every step of the way, yet regardless, here we are.
The numbers grew so much primarily because we wanted rewards to be compelling. Upgrading from a chestpiece that has 50 Strength into one that has 51 Strength is undeniably a DPS increase for the appropriate user, but it's not a very exciting reward. Such negligible increases can drive players to do some weird things, such as skipping over tiers of gear or entire levels of content. This is particularly relevant when we're talking about a new expansion. We don't want level-85 players to have a reasonable shot at level-90 dungeons and raids (or PvP opponents) just because that content is balanced for gear that isn't much better than what the level-85 players have.
So we arrived at this point in a logical fashion, and we don't really think we should have handled things any differently. However, it's still a weird place to be, and it's about to get weirder. These aren't real items, in that we don't know for sure what the item levels will be in patch 5.3 and patch 6.3 (if only we planned that far ahead!) but they are reasonable guesses, and you can see just how ridiculous the items look.
So what do we do about it? There are two general categories of solutions. The first is to make the numbers appear more manageable and the second is to actually change the numbers.
Mega Damage
The first solution could include changes like adding commas and the like to large numbers. We could also compress all of those 1000s to Ks and all of those 1,000,000s to Ms, much like we do with boss health today. Internally, we have been calling this the "Mega Damage solution" because instead of your Fireball hitting for 6,000,000 damage, it would hit for 6 MEGA DAMAGE (queue the Arcanite Ripper guitar solo).
If we can make numbers such as floating combat text and boss health and item stats a little easier to read at a glance, then maybe we can endure numbers increasing exponentially for many digits to come. Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can't quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we'd have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters.
Item Level Squish
The second solution actually involves compressing item levels, which is why we call it the "item level squish solution." If we can lower stats on items, then we can lower every other number in the game as well, such as how much damage a Fireball does or how much health a gronn has. If you look at the item level curves, you can see that most of the growth occurs at the maximum character levels for the various expansions. This is because we keep rewarding more and more powerful gear to make the new raid tier and PvP season in an expansion reward significantly better gear than the previous one. However, those huge item level jumps don't accomplish a lot once the character level has increased again. Very few players notice or care how much of an upgrade the Black Temple loot is over the Serpentshrine Cavern loot when their characters are level 80.
With that in mind, we could go back and compress the big item level increases that occur at level 60, 70, 80 and 85. The Mists of Pandaria gear would still grow exponentially from patch to patch, but the baselines would be a lot lower. Health could go from 150,000 back down to something like 20,000. The big risk of this approach is that players will log into the new expansion and feel nerfed... even if all the other numbers are compressed as well.
In other words, your Fireball will still do the same percentage damage to a player or a creature that it does today, but the number would be smaller. Logically, this seems like it would work, and it does. But it feels weird. When we tried this internally, everyone agreed that it just felt off throwing a spell for hundreds of damage when you are used to it doing thousands of damage.
I came up with an analogy -- even though I know logically that people drive on the left side of the street in the UK (we drive on the right side of the street in the US) and wouldn't be surprised to see it, it would still feel really disorienting if I was driving in the UK and had to make a right-hand turn.
So Now What?
As I type this today, we haven't decided on which if either solution we want to try. Maybe we'll come up with yet another solution. Maybe it's the kind of thing we can put off for another expansion so that players don't have to adjust to the new talent system and a drastic item level compression at the same time. Or maybe it's better just to pull the Band-Aid off fast and fix everything at once. Time will tell. I did, however, want to outline the problem lest any of you believe we don't think there is a problem. There is. We're just not sure of the best solution yet. If your answer is that stat budgets don't have to grow so much in order for players to still want the gear, our experience says otherwise, and thus these proposed solutions exist. Your thoughts on the matter are valuable.
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. The last time he used "Fig. 5" in an article, it related fish predation to estuarine hydrocarbon contamination.
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 9 of 10)
Snuffey Nov 4th 2011 3:12PM
I keep seeing people saying that the culprit was BC to Wrath well there was a smaller jump between BC to wrath and wrath to cata and even vanilla to BC(starting quest greens replaced high level raid gear out of the gate). The reason for the cata change was to bring healing to a more triage approach(if only at 4.1) as the base healing went up very little from 80 to 85 but mana costs skyrocketed so health as a consequence health had to skyrocket. An example of the item inflation is pre kara level tanking gear as a druid I had 22k health, in pre naxx(3.1) gear I had a little less than 30k health. In pre BWD gear I had 125k health 4x not 1.5x like in BC to Cata. Though this change was not across the board armor for example.
As for the squishing of stats I agree that suddenly having alot less health and doing alot less damage would be a large shock to most of the player base. Let's be honest only about 1% of the player base will even be aware of this post. A big part of playing an rpg is feeling as if you have grown more powerful as you progress thru the game. I must say squish would not bother me as I understand these are just numbers and don't have a real correlation to how powerful my character is but the percentage I have contributed to a raid or dungeon. Though most players I believe would not see it the same way, nerfs just suck even if it is only a perceived nerf.
cmichaelcooper Nov 4th 2011 3:25PM
I understand the concern that you want a meaningful jump in gear strength between tiers to avoid the doing of the next expansion's content in the previous expansion's gear, but I seriously think they need to go the DnD 2ed route and create a standardized progression of stats based on a concept like "hit dice" and just stick to it.
For example, my fighter in Neverwinter Nights has 10 hit points at level 1, and 100 hit points at level 10. That is a tremendous leap forward in power, so you have that, but it isn't confusing to look at.
Additionally, my opinion only, I don't like that I have to replace all of my level 80 questing gear to run a level 81 dungeon. It doesn't feel natural to me, even though I understand it conceptually.
VSUReaper Nov 4th 2011 3:37PM
I wish I could post a reply to GC's post, but no auth means no posting :(
Ilvl compression - its gonna suck at the start of every xpac, but when the alternative is trillions of damage then... /shrug
Honestly, with secondary stat % decreasing as you level, we already do more damage at 80 than we do at 85 in the exact same gear - just another thing that we will have to work past.
For the argument that it's extra work every xpac, I'm sure they would be able to figure out an elegant way to lower the ilvl across the board.
Also, with the whole "can't solo old content" - who cares? Do you really need to be able to solo MC? Why not just take a second person, or several people and decide ahead of time what people will get what.
What
My group of friends does is something like this: Wind Bindings are mine, rep items to the rouge, all cloth to the priest, and the DK wants the 2handers.
Issue solved.
Boobah Nov 4th 2011 4:29PM
For stuff like being unable to solo Molten Core... it's easy to deal with.
On the other hand, stuff like being able to grab a guild group of level-capped players and take a look at last expansion's end raid? Destroying that, IMO, is a bigger deal with the squish.
Malon Nov 4th 2011 4:35PM
Another vote here for the item level squish. Sounds like a great solution that can be repeated with every expansion, and it wouldn't take long to get used to the difference in damage.
marcuswauson Nov 4th 2011 4:37PM
I have an idea: First I'll focus on how it will effect characters leveling up then the change for characters at top level.
So for characters leveling up, what if you put a level cap on their gear, such that say maybe you can only have one point of any stat for every two levels your currently are at. So a level 10 would only be able to use 5 strength off of a piece of gear regardless of how much strength is actually on the gear. So that trying to skip up and get gear that is a higher ilvl would be mostly useless, but that you would simply be trying to reach the maximum stats you could on each piece of gear. There are modifications to this which I will discuss in the next paragraph as they would be most important to top level toons.
So for top level toons who are looking at differing tier's of gear, you would have Feats of Strength, such that say you just reached 85 and are gearing up running the last of the normal cata dungeons, if you complete all the cata dungeons say once then you receive an achievement that couples as a "Feat of Strength" which would say that for all 85 lvl gear your stats now are say 1% more effective and you are now able to have 1.3 points of a given stat per 2 levels. This would increase your overall dps/healing/ability to take damage, so that you would then be able run say heroics and get gear that would actually increase your stats where as if you have not completed your Feat of Strength for that Tier the next Tiers gear would not increase your stats. However you wouldn't be trying to jump content and tier's as you would not have finished your Feat of Strength an thus would not be able to effectively use the new gear. Then completing all of the Heroics once and at least 20 total would enable you to have 1.5 points per 2 levels and increase the effectiveness of your stats by 2%.
With raids it could be handled such that if you complete at least 5 different bosses as well as at least 12 total boss kills of the first tier then you get 1.7 points per every 2 lvls and 2.5% more effectiveness of stats, however if you kill all the bosses of the first tier of raiding you could then get 3% more effectiveness of stats.
The purpose of this adjustment is so that players will not want to get carried through to the next tier by their guild unless they have first completed that tiers feat of strength. The feat of strength insuring that players will should at least get some gear from that tier however are not limited to that tier after they have run it enough, plus driving players to not dodge content that they are not experienced at but to try to do it all at least once if they want the better gear. Also rewarding those who do complete all of the dungeons and raids.
Now back to the low lvls this would apply to them at those certain levels, such that running the lvl 70 raids would allow you to use more stats and have more effectiveness from their stats. Thus players who take the time to raid at lvl 70 would get more out of their raid gear and out of all level 70 gear.
Boobah Nov 4th 2011 5:31PM
So... you want to bring back attunements? By turning them into the gear grind? Ick and no thanks, especially since the raid tiers are designed to be skipped over; for those, it's a feature, not a bug.
One of the major points for WoW is that you don't need to stop and do the obsolete end game to be competitive in the current endgame. And 'obsolete' very much includes earlier raid tiers of the same expansion. The howls of frustration from Black Temple raiders forced to farm t4 and t5 content so they could attune and gear recruits still ring in my ears.
marcuswauson Nov 4th 2011 10:01PM
No the requirements would not be stringent as you think, they would simply be subtle challenges, is it really that hard or time consuming to run all of the Cata 5-mans once? It is not about farming a whole set, you wouldn't need a whole set, however it would limit you so that you don't jump entire tiers simply because the gear was obsolete and you could do the current challenges without it.
The current reward for killing heroic bosses is 70 jp's, cata has 11 top level 5 mans, and lets say they average 5 bosses a dungeon, I think its more like 4 but we'll call it 5, if you include a reward of 140 jps for a random dungeon and you run everone of them once how many jp's do you get? 5390, thats a maximum of 4 peices of jp gear if you only bought the 1250 ones but you don't have that many 1250 ones that I recall so its more like 3, is it really all that hard to expect players to run them all once? You already pretty much have to in order to get geared to run any raid.
The idea behind the Feats of strength is not to punish players into farming an entire 346 set then a 359 set then a 365 set so on and so on, but to merely provide a small limiting factor that restricts them from jumping straight to FL upon dinging yet restrict's the numbers from getting out of hand to quickly. It enables there to be a significant difference between 40 strength and 50 strength.
perderedeus Nov 4th 2011 4:38PM
Advocates of "Megadamage" ... please keep in mind that World of Warcraft is a game that relies heavily on math. Computations are constantly occurring, client and server side. Those databases are chock full of numbers, too. We cannot continue on the path toward 12-million-million damage -- we'll get to this crazy point sooner than you think, if this keeps up.
Regarding "old content" and wanting to one-shot it -- they can still do this. Let's say a raid is ideal at level 60, and you are level 90. They can implement a scaling buff for yourself that either increases your damage by a lot only while you are in that dungeon, or they can severely limit incoming damage for your character. In this second example, the fights will not be one-shots, but they will progress fairly quickly... and most importantly your character will be effectively invincible, simulating the insane outgearing that we have today.
Because yes, it's fun to take two or three people into Molten Core at 85 and just destroy the place. :) I think the devs realize that people like roflstomping old content for kicks and they will try to preserve that feeling.
antivyris Nov 4th 2011 4:43PM
The people talking about the stat i-lvl compression, assuming that it's going to make X harder or Y harder, you are all missing the elephant in the room.
This is all remarkably easy to do. Those numbers on your gear are not simply 'guessed'. All stats have a budget cost. This is all that would need to happen.
Cata and Wrath budget reduction for Stamina removed. Boss damage lowered across the board by the same %.
Then, it's just as simple as reducing the i-levels of an item by 20. When you do this, the stats lower as well. Slashing item budgets by a set % for all BC, Wrath, and Cata items after removing the stamina bonus brings everything back in line.
What they are really trying to do is figure out if they CAN do this. In BC, if people will remember, they had decided the easiest way to give survivability to cloth and leather users was increased health pools, and this carried over is it was popular and even increased in cata and wrath. However, if the community is finally agreeable to consider reduced damage and stats and measuring survivability and meters at a lower number, I definately see them going with the item compression.
Personally, I wish they would go a step further and compress levels, possibly moving levels to a 1-60, 1-40 being Vanilla, 40-45 being BC, 45-50 being Wrath, 50-55 being Cata, and 55-60 being MoP. However, everyone always seems never to back this since it is viewed by many as 'Taking away what's mine'. I'd assume that's the same thing with the mega damage, people want to be gods, even if it just because they feel many zeros are better then a couple.
Infamado Nov 4th 2011 5:02PM
Well they could squish the numbers to make them easier to work with, and then include an option in the interface tab that puts an M after every number in the game to satisfy the people who want to see larger numbers. Problem solved!
Robert Nov 4th 2011 5:04PM
Most notable part of the article to me:
There's a threat cap??? And tanks are ALREADY hitting it?!?!?
Doesn't this mean that once a tank has a sizeable threat lead he or she can just sit there and do nothing for the rest of the fight? (That is, provided your group doesn't need your dps.)
Isha Nov 4th 2011 5:16PM
Personally, the first solution I thought of was to increase the base power of spells through level increases.
What if, for example, instead of Fireball's power increasing from, for example. (2000 + 2.5*SP) from 85 to 86, what if it increased by (20,000 + 1.5*SP)? Though the item levels would still scale exponentially once we hit 90, the significant numbers increase until 90 would be built in, instead of coming from stats, so they would not have to create a ~100 ilvl difference between expansions. The bosses would just be tuned for 90 characters, which 85's couldn't compete with even if they had the best gear.
It would create some awkward level disparities for 4 levels, but I think it'd feel the least "weird" to implement.
Boobah Nov 4th 2011 5:41PM
How does that help? If the gear isn't better, it doesn't matter how the damage numbers come to be: people will still just wear the better gear, even if the net effect is less. Heck, if the gear increase is less drool-worthy, they're likely to keep the old stuff longer because what they went through to get the raid gear was almost certainly more meaningful than mere bear butt collecting.
Making the stats on gear worth less is more of a bandage for gear inflation, not a cure.
yagamimoon Nov 4th 2011 5:28PM
Compression is the way to go. Newbies might like to see big numbers, but also dont like to analize them. And in the end, Blizz always go for the user friendliest =)
Also, Pretty much like the driving example, you can get used to it over time =)
Adegan Nov 4th 2011 5:39PM
I vote squish. Not only because it means we won't get redunkulous numbers by the time XPAC6 rolls around, but also because it appears that new players will be able to skip dated expansion content and get straight to the newer stuff. It'll mean that blizz will have to tie quest availablilty to ilvl instead of clvl, which is workable.
gapid Nov 4th 2011 5:53PM
Players level too fast for gear to remain relevant until expansion plateaus. Stat-squishing and decreasing the power/level ratio makes leveling gear relevant longer. Players should have to update their gear every 25% of the way through the level cap instead of every 6 to 10 levels. At each expansion, flatten previous cap gear to a single i-level - the lowest denominator. Exponential power increase is desirable at max level as an incentive to keep raiding, but once the content is irrelevant, that incentive is no longer necessary at the previous cap for most of the subscribers. This also reduces the shock experienced in expansion borders, particularly for those who never raided. There is a natural desire to measure performance and lock that down to a static number, but we have short attention spans.
Schadenfreude Nov 4th 2011 6:09PM
In general I'm pretty "meh, they're just numbers". As long as the numbers change but my relative power is the same, it's all good.
Pomma Nov 4th 2011 6:54PM
Already a lot of comments here but I think a couple of points have yet to be brought up.
I think the start of much of the gear inflation happened at the release of BC. Prior to that stamina was itemized at the same value as any stat such as agi, int, or strength. With the release of BC Blizzard wanted higher HP values to worrk with. BC gear had stam valued so that 1.5 points of stam was basically of equal worth to 1 point of another stat (for evidence look at gems and random greens - the stam is 1.5 times the other stats). This worked to devalue vanilla gear so players could get immediate upgrades regardless of where they vinished their vanilla progression. They also set a prescedence of greens having a higher item level than most raiding gear at the same level. This is where the inflation really starts - and the pattern continues every time an xpack is released.
The reason why the numbers themselves don't really matter and blizz keeps restating this is that their mindset is more pointed to tuning encounters towards a Time to Live (TTL) philosophy. The numbers dont matter at all when the end goal is that a certain boss fight should last 6-8 minutes. The boss can hit as hard or as soft as it wants if the encounter timing and difficulty is correct.
Where this has some interesting implications is PVP. Players have spells that do X amount of damage and that damage is calculated or tuned roughly the same way given PVP or PVE. If Blizzard starts the stat crunch by tuning stam values back to vanilla rates then the burst damage can quickly overwhelm the shorter stam bars. Basically, PVP stats need to be tuned so the burst is not out of control but at ths same time feels right for the PVE encounter. Easy to do on the PVE side, we can see the proof in the nerfs happen every patch to the prior tier of raiding. PVP is not as easy to tune. In short, the PVP game is tied to the PVE game and vice versa.
The first approach that blizz could try is that for every NPC across the board HP would be cut down by 1/3. Outgoing damage for everything also cut by 1/3. And stam bonusses on gear normalized to vanilla levels to 1:1 of other primary stats.
That would be the place to start.
Next.. (holy shit this guy is still writing?) .. there needs to be some ratcheting back of the item levels. The place to get these iLevels back is that there should be some overlap from top raid gear of a prior xpack to starter greens of the current. Heroic ICC25 gear was leveled at 277 but the worst quest green come cata was 289 iLevel. If one happened to be questing in Storm Peaks and dinged 80 and rushed to Hyjal they not only would barely survive the simplest quest, the reward would be double the gear they had. The Hyjal greens could have started at iLevel 245 or 251 for example leading into T11 raid gear at iLevel 313.
But guess what? We laddered up iLevels for 3 xpacks. A 'squish' of all 3 of these xpacks could have T11 starting at say 232 iLevel. If I recall, a ToC10 (normal) geared tank could reasonably have had 30-32k HP. Couple this with a reset in the stamina coefficient and we could have had T11 starting gear looking like the 20-23k HP. All the while none of these changes really effect PVP or PVE mechanics, timing, difficulty, or length. If we finally get 150k HP tanks in patch 6.3 it will be ok.
This is honestly the most elegant way Blizzard can deal with escalating stats.
Justin Ringle Nov 4th 2011 6:50PM
I like the Squish Idea. Just saying